Where the Personal and the Political meet, get drunk and have unprotected sex. (And never, EVER use Oxford commas!)

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

The Endless Frontier

At the Archdruid’s suggestion, I’ve been reading Overshoot by the recently deceased
William Catton. I can see why JMG was so inspired by the book. It’s beautifully
written and extremely enlightening, even though I’ve already encountered many
of the same principles in The Archdruid
Report.

Catton talks about how Europeans found a seemingly limitless
bonanza when they subjugated the peoples of the Americas, Africa and Asia and
exploited their labor and natural resources. This was the foundation of JMG’s
“civil religion of progress.” It appeared to them that, with the right
technologies, they could grow their economies forever and, ultimately, conquer
time and space.

In a sense, the USA was founded on the idea of our infinite
bounty. It subsidized “the land of the free” by endowing us with the material basis
of independence. This Horn of Plenty promised freedom from tyrannical
governments. We didn’t need to grovel to a king or the local baron for our
daily bread. The land was too big to be fenced in by enclosures. It was an
Elysian field of dreams that could liberate us from the constraints of the Old
World.

We no longer had to be herded into cities or villages with
the rest of the unwashed masses. Instead of staying in the crowded settlements
along the Eastern Seaboard, Americans could move west to the Frontier and
escape the social and physical demands of living in community with people of
different religions, ethnicities and philosophies.

The New World offered us the space to be free of our
neighbors’ rights and beliefs. It negated the need for compromise. Our suburbs,
towns and homesteads are spread far and wide across the landscape to provide us
privacy and “breathing room.” We’re basically trying to escape each other. In
this atomized society, consensus is an elusive goal.

In the past century, the physical space has largely been
replaced by cyberspace and “safe spaces” offered by the intellectual ghettos of
fundamentalist religion, dogmatic academia and special-interest websites. We
protect our theories from challenge and refuse to contribute to the mainstream,
denying our gifts to the larger community. Our contributions have been rejected
before, and the pain of that rejection has discouraged us from speaking up in
the public square.

The endless frontier also freed us from concern over scarcity.
We could formulate any grand scheme we wanted without worrying about exhausting
our resources. If it failed, we would always have the resources to dismantle it
and replace it with something grander. It isn’t hard to see how this indulgent
attitude has led to intellectual laziness. If there are no consequences for
failure, there’s no need to be rigorous. The Archdruid has noted our tendency
not to think in terms of whole systems. I would also call it a failure to think
holistically.

The myth of limitlessness has had profound aesthetic
consequences. Our country is littered with them. They are the physical relics
of the belief in our omnipotence. We thought we could throw up any huge,
plastic monstrosity of a building we wanted. If it didn’t work out, we could
just tear it down and replace it with something better, bigger or, at least,
less offensive. Or, if our displeasure with the edifice is not shared by the
rest of the community and it remains standing, we can withdraw into our
Fortresses of Solitude, losing ourselves in the virtual realities of TV and the
internet, perhaps lobbing verbal grenades at the monstrosity’s creators from
the safe distance of online forums.

But the endlessly rapacious consumerist ethic reaches its
fullest expression in our personal appearance. Ironically, we try to conserve
our physical strength and emotional stress-load by maintaining a casual
attitude and appearance, even in public. We lazily throw on any old thing
before we leave the house, sparing ourselves the effort of dressing to the
nines. We’re notorious for “letting ourselves go,” indulging in food and
sedentary lifestyles until we’re obese, often morbidly so.

Like the fabled grasshopper, we indulge our impulses and
mortgage our future in favor of instant gratification. If we think about the
future at all, we assume there will always be an infrastructure to support us
if we’re unable to care for ourselves. We also assume that we’ll have the
financial resources to afford this personal care, whether it’s provided by human
attendants or machines.

It reminds me of an excerpt from Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone about the Tea Party’s
hypocrisy. He attends a speech by a Tea Party politician in Kentucky who is
addressing senior citizens, many of whom are in personal scooters that Medicare
paid for. They’re unaware that Medicare is a government program. They have no
inkling of their dependence on the government and fellow taxpayers.

They thought they could treat their bodies like a garbage
dump by stuffing their faces with junk food, filling their lungs with cigarette
smoke or lying on the couch all evening watching TV after staring at a computer
screen all day. It never occurs to them that they may need their fellow
Americans’ assistance, financially or physically, when the consequences of
those choices take their predictable toll.

We also expect society to adjust to us emotionally, failing
to show empathy for our fellow citizens, who are under the same stresses we are.
We assume there’s a bottomless pit into which we can throw our anger,
resentment, bitterness, sadness. We don’t know or care that all these slings
and arrows eventually find their mark in someone. Usually, it’s the person who
expressed the negative feeling who’s wounded, but we all suffer, even when the
victim suffers alone.

We seem to have come to the end of the spatial frontier. Much
to our chagrin, we’ve found our (relative) freedom from physical limits and other
people to be as empty as the Americas our ancestors found. But really it’s the
closing of the psychological frontier that scares us. We hate the idea of being
stuck in the same headspace with our co-workers and neighbors. We hate the idea
of having to compromise with them. We assume there will always be a way to
escape our present community and the limits it imposes on us. Unfortunately,
the digital frontier is proving just as hollow as its physical precursors.

Last year, I took a cruise with my parents on the Rhine and
Mosel rivers. Despite the assertions of our Amero-centric media, the discipline
of limits has produced great beauty and vibrant, healthy cultures in the Old
World. The ignorance of limits in the New World has produced a lazy, wasteful,
ugly culture that continues to dehumanize and alienate its inhabitants. Surely,
we’ve been given enough signals in the past few decades to know that we’re on
the wrong path.

There are endless frontiers, but not the physical ones we’ve
been taught to believe in. There will always be unknown territories of the
mind, body and soul, not just our own but those belonging to others. We need to
find meaning in the exploration of those undiscovered countries and stop
relying on material signposts to tell us when we’re pushing the boundaries of
experience and perception, in other words, “living.” We must reclaim the Personal
Realm or, as Comic Book Guy from The
Simpsons describes it, “Human contact: the final frontier.”

2 comments:

Wow, that was poetic and well written thesis on apathy and bounded space. I want to elaborate on apathy a bit more. Apathy I found is the most dangerous aspect of our modern zeitgeist. It along with ignorance keeps us from acknowledging Peak Oil, Limits to Growth, Global Warming and all other conundrum we face. In fact it is more dangerous then all these items I mentioned because it places us in spot where we feel safe and need not deal with these problems.

When I do presentations on Peak Oil, invariable the response of people in the crowd is how they never knew about it. It was never mentioned on Fox News. Muslim terrorists were what they feared and sending troops to the Middle East was the answer.

So like rot building up on wood beams of a roof. These problems will build up until they can no longer be ignored. But most will not be prepared. The people will cry like toddlers left in the room by themselves. But there is no easy answer. Building coal and nuke plants takes years to decades. And this is no real answer for oil deprivation. It will be the 1973 oil crisis writ larger. By doing nothing we made it worse.

Thanx for the compliment, Oil! I agree that apathy is probably the most dangerous aspect of the zeitgeist. It's a wall protecting us from our despair, while also preventing us from tapping into other emotions that would provide the energy and motivation for an escape. The problem is, once you break down that wall, there's no going back. I should know; I tried. The evil of my luxury was laid bare, and I could no longer take comfort in it.

Apathy is the price of a culture that claims the economy can meet our needs and all we have to do is sit back, punch buttons, watch TV and do what the images tell us.